Speaker has nothing good to say about rail proposal

Posted: Thursday, March 15, 2007

ATLANTA - Speaker Glenn Richardson said Wednesday he opposes passenger rail service as outdated and inefficient, calling the proposed service between Athens and Atlanta, "a train from nowhere to nowhere."

Richardson's comments came during a wide-ranging interview with newspaper reporters in his office.

Asked about "the Brain Train" - the name picked by advocates because it would link Georgia Tech, Emory University and the University of Georgia - Richardson dismissed the moniker as "a cutesy name so everybody feels good about it."

"I call it a train from nowhere to nowhere," he said. "... There's no rhyme or reason in the 21st century to lay down pieces of steel and move an object back and forth across it. That was really great in the year 1807, maybe even 1907, but I don't think it exists in 2007."

Rail is too costly, there won't be enough riders to significantly impact highway congestion or pollution, and passengers still will require other modes of transportation to get from the rail stations to their ultimate destinations, he said. He recounted a quip from a Middle Georgia friend who suggested helicopters ferrying riders might be cheaper.

But Richardson is a well-known critic of government-operated passenger rail service, says Gabriel Sterling, executive director of Georgians for the Brain Train.

"We're talking to lots of folks at the Capitol about this," Sterling said.

With 12 stops on the line initially and the ability to branch out toward other cities to develop a network of routes, the Athens-to-Atlanta proposal is a good beginning, he said.

Other ways of reducing highway congestion, such as additional road construction, would cost more than the train and take longer, Sterling said.

"This is the most cost-effective, fastest way to get more capacity out of that corridor," he said.

Funding for the train is unlikely to be included in any state budgets as long as the speaker still is in power.

A pair of legislative proposals would allow voters to raise the sales tax - either statewide or regionally - to fund additional transportation projects. Richardson said he hasn't made up his mind on them yet, but he said he's not sold on the regional option for various reasons. Incidentally, the regional option would allow the new taxes to be spent on passenger rail service while the statewide version wouldn't.